Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Linksys (Cisco) WRT310N Wireless-N Gigabit Router

During the last big electrical storm, one of the ports on my Linksys BEFSR41 Etherfast Cable/DSL Router died. Since that's the router at the center of the "office" zone of my home network, that was an issue...

I figured it was time to retire the Linksys WAP11 wifi access point as well, so I picked up a Linksys WRT310N Wireless-N Gigabit Router to kill two birds with one stone.

I must say, we were off to a rocky start. When I get a new router, I pull out the manual and study up the night before installation so I can plan cable and network routing. No actual manual in the box. Just a CD-ROM and a sheet saying "run the CD-ROM."

So this morning, I give it a shot: stick the "wizard" CD in my drive... Grind... spit... nothing.

Reconfigure my workstation for DHCP, and pull up the interface at it the default address of 192.168.1.1Success! I can access with the old standby default "admin" password.

Change the config to static IP and... boom! Interrupted network connection.I fiddled around with assorted settings on the computer end of things, but just couldn't get past it. No information online about this issue. (I assume most people are running DHCP upstream)

So, in an act of desperation, I boot up a (Mac) laptop, and try again from there.Everything works fine.

I spent an extra hour getting this device set up.But I must say, so far the actual performance has been outstanding. The wifi connection has been screaming fast and rock-solid. MUCH better range than the old Access Point. The DMZ routing has been working fine, and I was able to replicate my old network configuration.

Overall, I'm very happy with the purchase. Mac users need to be aware that the CD is a coaster for them. If you're familiar with previous Linksys consumer routers, then this one should be easy to set up.

I don't know if the configuration issue was mac-related (I'm assuming not), but if you plan to get one of these and configure it using the web interface, make sure you have a wifi-enabled computer with IE6+ or Firefox on it.

3 comments:

Glad to hear some personal opinions on this router. I bought one yesterday, but I can't seem to make it act as an access point. I only connected the 4 ports (no cable in the internet port) and disabled Upnp and DHCP. The router itself aquires an IP as well as the wired computers. When it comes to wireless, it cannot assign any IP. It's just not working. Do you have any suggestions from your experience?Thanks!

It's possible that unit is just faulty and the wifi isn't working.In my case, I disconnected everything from the ethernet ports, booted up a laptop and connected via the unsecured wifi to configure.Because I was on a Mac, I wasn't able to run the setup CD.

If you disabled DHCP, then it wouldn't be able to "assign" IP addresses to the wifi clients.

In my setup, the router is at a fixed IP address and acts as the DHCP server for the office ethernet and wifi zones.

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About LonADay

Lon Koenig makes experiences.
As a communications technologist with a broad background in education,
advertising and games, he has developed visual design, human interface
design, sound design and/or programming for kiosks, trade show experiences,
art installations and educational software. If you played Oregon
Trail in the '90s, you’ve experienced Lon’s work.
His hobby is computational linguistics, his life is music and technology,
and his clients have included Disney, Target, Honeywell and Jim Henson
Productions. Lon appears on many services as "schnoggo."